Le naufrage du radeau de la Méduse, esquisse

This undated oil sketch for The Raft of the Medusa — one of the most celebrated paintings in the history of French art — is held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Angers and represents one of the preparatory stages through which Géricault worked toward his monumental 1819 canvas now in the Louvre. The actual shipwreck of the frigate Méduse in 1816, in which inadequate lifeboats left 149 people adrift on a raft, became a political scandal implicating the incompetence of Bourbon-era naval command. Géricault threw himself into preparation for the painting with extraordinary intensity — interviewing survivors, studying cadavers and severed limbs, making multiple compositional sketches. Preparatory esquises like this one document the evolutionary process of one of the nineteenth century's most ambitious pictorial projects, showing Géricault working through compositional alternatives before committing to the final arrangement of bodies on the raft.

A compositional esquise typically works in broadly blocked areas of value with figures indicated rather than resolved, testing the large-scale arrangement of light and shadow masses before the work of detailed figure painting begins. Géricault's esquises show his method of building from the large rhythms of the composition downward to the individual figure.